IN A 1910 LETTER, Virginia Woolf complained that Bernard Shaw
“kept us on the rack for 3 hours” with his new play
Misalliance, attributing to the playwright “the mind
of a disgustingly precocious child of 2—a sad and improper
spectacle to my thinking.” Her prickly ambivalence towards GBS
notwithstanding, the response might seem indicative of Woolf’s
general view of the theater. The spectacles she witnessed on stage
often disappointed her, paling in comparison to what she called
“theatre of the brain.” Nonetheless, while she often avowed her
preference for being an imaginative reader rather than a viewer,
Woolf frequented theatrical and operatic performances. The drama
held a mysterious lure for modernists proficient in other genres.
While there are a handful of crossover successes, including William
Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot, many
scriptural efforts remain eccentric curiosities scattered among
prose masterpieces, as is the case with James Joyce, E. M. Forster,
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.
The conventional view is that Woolf belongs in the latter category
with Freshwater treated as merely an extension of
Bloomsbury role-playing and a tosh of inside jokes. Steven D.
Putzel’s Virginia Woolf and the Theater assays to
revise this view, claiming not that her play has been undervalued
necessarily but that her relationship to the theater, both
personally and professionally, is much more complex and
far-reaching than biographers and scholars have estimated. In fact,
his book’s unusual turn in its second half intimates that
contemporary female playwrights as well as practitioners who seek
to adapt Woolf’s prose for the stage help to restore a fuller sense
of how she transfigured theatrical dynamics for the page.

Putzel’s introduction maps out a critical genealogy focused on
Woolf’s relationship to the drama, beginning with the pioneering
work of Jane Marcus and Louise DeSalvo and extending through recent
studies by Penny Farfen and Georgia Johnston. Yet he maintains that
an accrued silence persists in the scholarly conversation around
Woolf’s theatrical influences that belies their crucial role in
shaping her technique. As a remedy, the book seeks to recover a
record, culled from a variety of sources, of Woolf’s theatergoing
and practice. Its first half is composed of a loosely chronological
gathering of extracts from juvenilia as well as notebooks, diary
entries, essays, and letters interspersed with bits of theater
history and speculative reconstruction. Together they fill in a
side of Woolf’s life that Putzel maintains has been underemphasized
by previous biographers including her responses to the productions
she attended as a child. In the opening chapter, Putzel catalogs
references to witnessed performances of plays, minstrels, operas,
and pantos, identifying significant elements of production style
that resonate in her novels. Framed by the narrative of her
meta-theatrical relationship with Lytton Strachey, eloquent
analysis in chapter two convincingly lays the groundwork for his
argument about the influence of the Play-Reading Society and other
private Bloomsbury performances on Woolf’s later prose. The third
chapter documents Woolf’s connections with the Actresses’ Franchise
League and a handful of prominent actresses, but, as with the first
two chapters, the commentary gingerly navigates around significant
discrepancies such as, for example, Woolf’s lack of interest in the
surging work of female playwrights. What emerges from these
chapters is a clear sense that she is engaged not with the material
theater but with the concept and practice of theatricality itself.
If theater is an imitation of an action, she found what happened
between the acts more compelling. Frustrated by the overwrought,
plot-driven theater of her time, she was intrigued by the art
form’s semantic gaps, semiotic multiplicity, and the
circumscription of meaning by audiences and performers. Her
interest in actresses, in the ways in which they suture what Woolf
refers to as “the scattered sketches” that make up identity,
demonstrates that theater for her models the performative
conception of selfhood. As such, Putzel’s first three chapters
recover the early makings of a sensibility that will eventually
synthesize dynamics of both seeing and practicing theater.

The material, especially Woolf’s periodic diary experiments in
crafting play ideas and stage...

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